Today many wireless telecommunications technologies, for example, the Global System for Mobile communications (GSM), offer a Short Message Service (SMS) which enables a caller to deliver a short text message to a mobile terminal for display at the mobile terminal.
Callers wishing to send short messages to mobile terminals can call an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system and respond to a voice menu to select from among a limited number of predefined short messages. This system is cumbersome to use and offers only a limited range of short messages to the caller. Moreover, the caller receives no reply from the called party except, in some cases, an acknowledgement that the short message has been received.
Alternatively, callers wishing to send short messages to mobile terminals may place a voice call to a human operator and speak the desired message to the operator. The operator types the spoken message as text on a data terminal, and the short message subsystem delivers the typed message to the mobile terminal for display. Unfortutately, this process is error-prone and lacks privacy. Moreover, the called party cannot return a short message to the calling party.
Alternatively, callers wishing to send short messages to mobile terminals may use workstations running software applications specifically designed to interact with the short message subsystems. This approach offers flexibility in message content and privacy to the caller, but requires that the caller have access to a workstation running the required software application. As workstations running such software applications are few and far between, the caller may not have access to such a workstation when and where he wants to send a short message.
Moreover, callers generally prefer voice service to short message service and want to use short message service only when a voice connection cannot be established. The existing short message services do not enable the caller to determine whether a voice call can be achieved instead of sending a short text message.